“The universe doesn’t allow perfection.” Stephen Hawking
You know, it’s a good thing I don’t get paid to do this, because it would screw things up terribly. I never have to give a thought to being perfect, whatever that means. Who am I to argue with Stephen Hawking anyway? However, it would be fun to find out if the bucks would change me, but I really don’t think so.
On my way home just now, I was thinking how much I looked forward to doing this every week. This is where I get to spend some quality time with myself. My entire world shrinks all around. It’s me and you. I swear to God, I always write like I am having a conversation with you, just you. In my best selling, ground breaking autobiography, Halloween in Portland, I was only talking to my grandson. After that, it has always been the three of us, me, you and him.
I absolutely have to tell you something else, but I don’t quite know how to say it. I don’t have the words to explain how much my music means to me. Music is its own language and it speaks to each of us in a totally unique dialect, understood by one. It is something you feel. There’s no vocabulary that can ever do it justice.
I must write with my music, a magic carpet ride for my mind, inhabiting the inevitable spaces that grow between thoughts and words and feelings. My love of music goes back to the early Fifties, when radio and records made you feel like you owned the sounds you heard. It became deeply personal from that moment on, always with me.
Every moron, my age or so, has opinions about the Sixties. I have no interest in my Cliff Notes version of an era that had more magic in it than any time since, by a fucken mile. Believe me, I was definitely on the periphery of it all, but I was breathing that air.
I kid you not, Frank Sinatra just started singing, “Come Fly With Me”. He is singing about the air being rarefied. That’s what I mean about music being prescient, mood clairvoyant.
Music can have a synchronicity in your life that makes you believe in God, at least it does that for me. I really didn’t mean to get off on this musical tangent. Music is my muse, which sounds like trite shit, but I can’t really do better and don’t care to anyway.
I am sitting here, into this for a couple of hours now. I have not gotten anywhere near where I wanted to be. A couple of mornings ago, I was sitting on my cushion, waiting for the damn timer to go off. Please don’t tell the Buddha that I actually check the timer to see how I’m doing. I’ve been at this discipline, pretty much every morning, for around thirty years now, which is a damn, long time. I am still not very good at it and I am fine.
So, there I was on the cushion a couple of mornings ago………… Finally, I get to interrupt myself at the right time. This paragraph has begun around the same time as yesterday. I wanted to stop when I did, because it was feeling like two different stories and we are done with the one. I spent today dancing around the second half.
I don’t know why, but I started thinking about the infinite number of choices we make throughout our lives. Every single time we make a choice, we turn our back on all the other alternatives. At the very least, it is a mental commitment, sometimes overridden by the heart, if you are not in synch with yourself.
I also realized you could go nuts thinking about every single time you make a choice, because it is non-stop throughout your day, every day. I am really talking about decisions, which are more thought provoking, with a growing feeling of indelibility about them, especially as time moves past the moment. This is more about flexing the mind muscle than it is about a quick, knee-jerk alternative.
The big decisions are like place markers in our lives, becoming the personalized fabric of our very own, coat of many colors. Cushion bound that morning, it felt like I am parachuting through my world, directed by decisions, hoping for a gentle landing each time.
I have always believed the choices we make have been predetermined by invisible forces far greater than ourselves. We like to think we can change the direction of our lives, somehow defying fate. It’s like holding a compass in your hand. You can change direction as often as you like, but true north is unchanged.
Man, I can look back over my life at all the twists and turns and here I am, all these years later. When this idea hit me a few days ago, my initial reaction was to start thinking about all the big choices I’ve made, which I shut down before even getting off the cushion. The only constant in life is change, a supremely, fickle companion.’
Here I am on a Sunday morning, my third sitting with this story, listening to Aretha sing R-E-S-P-E-C-T, flooded with a tear filled gratitude. Somehow, the infinite array of choices made over the decades has parachuted me into this precise moment of sharing with you.
Thanks for listening.